KEY POINTS:
A German pilot screamed moments before the Air New Zealand Airbus A320 he was flying crashed off the French coast seven weeks ago, the cockpit voice recorder has revealed.
Five New Zealanders and two Germans died in the crash.
TV3 tonight reported chief French investigator John-Pierre Dreno as saying the cockpit voice recorder revealed the pilots were having trouble controlling the plane. It then caught the scream of the pilot just before impact.
Mr Dreno said it appeared the plane had suffered a power surge during the landing approach which caused it to climb sharply. The plane then stalled, tipped on its side and plunged into the sea.
The Weekend Herald reported Mr Dreno as saying unravelling the cause of the crash was proving difficult, as data extracted from the two flight recorders had turned out to be "contradictory".
"The difficulty lies 'in a contradiction' between the recorder which contains the aircraft parameters - the flight data recorder - and the voice recorder," he said.
The voice recorder records the conversation on the flight deck, while the digital flight data recorder records 88 instrument readings.
Together they should reveal what the crew and aircraft said and did.
Information from the badly damaged boxes had to be retrieved by their American maker, Honeywell.
"We understand that data from the recorders is contradictory and still does not explain the catastrophe," Mr Dreno told the Herald.
"We are going over this again with the experts. We really don't understand what happened ... It is going to be rather difficult. It will take a few more days before we can say what kind of result can be obtained from analysing the recorders."
The New Zealanders killed were Captain Brian Horrell, 52, from Auckland; Christchurch engineers Michael Gyles, 49, and Noel Marsh, 35; Civil Aviation Authority airworthiness inspector Jeremy Cook, 58, of Wellington; and Murray White, 37, an Air New Zealand engineer, from Auckland.
The bodies of Mr Horrell, Mr Gyles, Mr Marsh and Mr Cook were yesterday handed to their families, who had travelled to Perpignan. However, the body of Mr White remains missing.
The families of the two German pilots, known only as Norbert K and Theo K, arrive in Perpignan next Tuesday to claim their bodies.
The New Zealand contingent is due in Auckland on Tuesday morning.
- NZPA
